Depth perception for a three dimensional television (3D TV) is provided by capturing two views, one for the left eye and other for the right eye. These two views are compressed and sent over various networks or stored on storage media. A decoder decodes the two views and sends the decoded video to the 3D TV for display. The two views are known to be either merged into a single video frame or kept separate.
A known benefit of merging the two views in a single video frame is that current encoders and decoders can be used to compress and decompress the video. However, this approach creates two problems. First, video compression algorithms, such as MPEG-4 AVC based compression algorithms, cause cross talk between the two views at their edges. One approach currently used to avoid cross talk between the two eye views is to turn off the deblocking filter in the AVC/H.264 encoding process. However, this approach is known to reduce coding efficiency and creates blocking artifacts in the video. A second problem with merging the two views in a single video frame is that the merged video is not backward compatible with two dimensional (2D) TVs, that is, current 2D TVs cannot display the decoded video corresponding to one of the two views.